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By experiments which are now classic, it became
established that the quantity of heat thus created independently of
the nature of the bodies is always (provided no other phenomena
intervene) proportional to the energy which has disappeared.
Reciprocally, also, heat may disappear, and we always find a constant
relation between the quantities of heat and work which mutually
replace each other.
It is quite clear that such experiments do not prove that heat is
work. We might just as well say that work is heat. It is making a
gratuitous hypothesis to admit this reduction of heat to mechanism;
but this hypothesis was so seductive, and so much in conformity with
the desire of nearly all physicists to arrive at some sort of unity in
nature, that they made it with eagerness and became unreservedly
convinced that heat was an active internal force.
Their error was not in admitting this hypothesis; it was a legitimate
one since it has proved very fruitful. But some of them committed the
fault of forgetting that it was an hypothesis, and considered it a
demonstrated truth.


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